Horse Racing / Grahame L. Jones : Sport Is Hurting, and Less of It Could Be the Answer

Is there too much thoroughbred racing in Southern California, or are there simply too many race tracks?

Is the public best served by being able to go the races 283 days out of 365, as fans will be able to do this year?

And are they really fans, or are the majority of them merely gamblers?

These are questions that are not often discussed at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park or Del Mar, but they should be. Racing is hurting, and more racing is not the answer. Less racing could be.

As matters stand, the local racing “season” is never-ending. The Santa Anita winter-spring meeting runs into the Hollywood Park spring-summer meeting, which runs into the Del Mar summer meeting, which overlaps with the summer Orange County Fair meeting at Los Alamitos.

Then comes the fall Los Angeles County Fair meeting at Pomona, which runs into the fall Oak Tree meeting at Santa Anita, which runs into the fall-winter meeting at Hollywood Park, which runs into the winter-spring meeting at Santa Anita.

What that all adds up to is an astonishing 2,694 thoroughbred races being run in Southern California this year.

Enough, already.

It is being made abundantly clear by the dwindling on-track attendance figures that the public has had its fill. Fans are tired of this not-so-merry-go-round, even if its horses are real.

Real they might be, but race worthy many of them are not. The fact is, there simply are not enough quality horses around to fill that many races. But the fields must be filled, so what the public ends up seeing are horses that belong nowhere near a track, let alone in a race.

It’s no wonder so many of them break down.

Pointing to the success of the off-track betting facilities as an indication of the sports’ continuing health is a joke. They are exactly what their name says: betting facilities. The people who go to them are gamblers, not horse racing fans. To them, the horses are just a roll of the dice. If they could sit at home, watch the races on television and bet by telephone, they would do so in an instant.

But is that what racing is all about--just a turn of the card, a spin of the wheel? Handle is everything, and horses and riders be damned?

Too often, it seems that way.

The decision-makers in racing’s higher echelons appear blind to just how unbalanced their sport has become. There are too many races, period. And there are too many that are hyped as being meaningful and significant simply because they have graded status or carry a large purse.

By being free and easy with its grades, racing has devalued the meaning of a graded race. And what does a $100,000 race mean anymore? They hold those twice a week. How can Southern California possibly have 100 graded races this year? It does. How can it have 99 races worth $100,000 or more? It does.

Nothing will change, of course. Greed is its own motivator. But wouldn’t it be better for the sport--not the gamblers, the sport--if Los Angeles had only one race track, and if the San Diego and San Francisco areas each had only one, too?

As one example of alternate possibilities, wouldn’t a winter-spring meeting in Los Angeles, a spring-summer meeting in the Bay Area and a summer-fall meeting in San Diego make for more interesting racing?

Wouldn’t it be pleasant to have a racing “season” to look forward to once again?

A.L. (Tony) Diaz, a six-time riding champion at Bay Meadows, apparently learned nothing from the mistake made by fellow jockey Dennis Rond last December.

That was when Rond received a 5-year suspension after being found in possession of an illegal electrical device for the second time.

Diaz, 40, was caught with a battery after winning the fourth race on Velvet Blue at Bay Meadows Nov. 19. Wednesday, stewards at the Northern California track handed him a 25-month suspension that will keep him out of racing through at least Dec. 31, 1990.

“He admitted using the electrical device in the post parade prior to the race, but denied using it during the race,” steward Dennis Nevin said. “He still violated the rules by being in possession of an illegal electrical device.”

The claim is frequently made--not by the jockeys themselves but by race track public relations types--that Southern California has the best jockey colony in the world.

Clearly, since most local riders seldom venture to Europe to take on the best there, that claim is so much nonsense.

But does Southern California have the most successful jockey colony in the country? The advent of the Breeders’ Cup 5 years ago allows at least a quantitative, if not qualitative, judgment to be made.

Of the 35 Breeders’ Cup races held, local jockeys have won 12, or just more than a third. Of the 19 jockeys who have won a Breeders’ Cup race, seven are Southern California based: Laffit Pincay, with 4 victories; Chris McCarron and Patrick Valenzuela, 2 each; and Eddie Delahoussaye, Bill Shoemaker, Ray Sibille and Fernando Toro, 1 each.

There is no Breeders’ Cup race that has escaped a local rider, Sibille’s victory in the Breeders’ Cup Turf this year having meant that all seven have been won at least once by jockeys on the Santa Anita-Hollywood Park-Del Mar circuit.

Judged by Breeders’ Cup success alone, Southern California can claim to have the country’s best jockey colony. But let’s not hear any more talk about being the “world’s” best--at least not until it has been proven on the race tracks of Europe.